roachboy

am seeing this better now---i guess i mistook a kind of aggressive tone for something other than it was in your posts.

i usually go after posts in which the ideology is visible and working in the opinions of individual posters--that is in those places where they integrate (often wholesale) ideological clusters--that is: signifiers/ways of connecting them and/or using them to process information--usually wholesale into their personal views. i do this because, more often than not, it seems that taking over these clusters substitutes for thinking--or, in other instances, these "machines" are reproduced in an individuals posts seemingly unawares. i find these interactions of individual positions and ideology interesting. i find it usually really obvious in folk who operate from the right. but the catch is that it puts me in a position of being mostly reactive. which is why i asked you to post something of your views so that a conversation could get started.

we could probably have a long debate about genre over this.
but it would seem to me to go even further outside the threadlogic than we already have--and i think we have to be near some kind of limit.
i think for me the genre classification would follow from the nature of the premises.
a philosophical type discussion is entirely possible on the basis of theological axioms--most of heidegger for example--lots of others---2,000 years worth no less.


my point is that because there is no agreement about premises upon which a debate about abortion should happen, that it makes no sense for anti-choice folk to attempt to impose their views on the rest of us by agitating to make abortion illegal.
my argument is that keeping the procedure legal and safe has nothing to do with the complexity of the debates that women (primarily) woudl have over whether they would or would not have the procedure.
the claim that one must make the procedure illegal because not to makes it a matter of course to have an abortion is, to me, offensive as an assumption. i do not think the decision about having one is easy. i know several people who have had them, and for each it was really really difficult, the decision. it is patronizing for those who oppose the procedure to imagine that there is no debate within folk about whether to use it or not. this is the most basic area of disagreement i have with anti-choice people. and it has nothing to do with how i might choose to position them in a mesageboard post--but it does have to do with the reverse, how folk who oppose abortion choose to make into a cartoon the ethical worlds of women who may find themselves having to think through whether they should have an abortion or not.


the decision to have the procedure or not obviously turns on this matter.
no-one pretends that this is not at stake.
who are you to presume to judge whether the criteria a woman who chooses to have an abortion brings to bear on the decision are or are not adequate?
seriously--what puts you in the position to render judgements about this very personal, very difficult decision? you argue above, repeatedly, that for you killing another can be justified--then you should also be in a position to grant that those who choose to have an abortion come to the decision that their actions are justified.

it is not a cavalier action, undergoing this process.
and if there is an attitude that angers me on this--and which is the reason i check out of these debates more often than not, it is that folk who oppose abortion seem to think that the legality of the procedure obviates its complexity. that move--which is, sadly, typical of most anti-choice people i know in 3-d land (we dont tend to get along well if this topic comes up) or in messageboard land--is the problem.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite